Christina:

Welcome to the JOMOcast. I'm Christina Crook, your host and guide here in JOMOland. Today's episode is a welcome to everyone out there for what I hope will be a life-giving, fun and, provocative journey to reclaim joy in all our lives. I'll be interviewing guests that have studied, inspired, or innovated joy–the ways we find it, lose it and get it back. You'll meet people like Artery co-founder Selema Ebrahim, Effin’ Bird's creator, Aaron Reynolds, and Joe Hollier, co-creator of the Light Phone. 

The point of today's episode is to shed some light on why I'm so passionate about this topic and why I think it's relevant, if not vital, for all of us to explore the ways we could be living more joyful lives. I've devoted myself to studying, teaching, and talking about joy. And I truly believe that learning how to measure and enable human happiness in an evolving world is one of the defining challenges of our century. 

I think everyone listening today, myself included, has a feeling–for some of us it's screaming out loud, for some of us it's a gnawing doubt in the back of our minds–that something's wrong. We're living longer than ever. We're safer than ever. Standards of living are up around the world. We have no shortage of things to entertain, educate, and delight us. And yet we're just not happy.

Increasingly we feel a sickness of the heart. Depression and anxiety are on the rise. People report being lonelier than ever. And for more and more of us, the future is a source of fear and worry, not wonder. What's going on here? In the race to build bigger, better, cheaper, and faster, we've paid a lot of hidden costs. And what's happening in society is that we're slowly beginning, in increasing numbers, to wake up to that reality.

We're noticing that we're losing as we're gaining, often without our knowledge or consent. And the biggest casualty has been joy. To fix this, we need to miss out. JOMO, right? That's what we're talking about. But missing out doesn't mean less. Let me repeat that: missing out doesn't mean less. It means leaving the other stuff behind–the stuff that makes you feel empty, anxious, tired, or lonely–to replace it with the stuff that makes you feel vital, purposeful, loved, and valuable.

Now it's impossible to talk about missing out without acknowledging JOMO’s opposing force FOMO. The danger of forces like FOMO is not only in the pressure to try to do, be, and experience everything, it's the lie that we're told that it's possible. Think about that for a second. The lie we're told that it's possible to do, and be, and experience everything. 

Every moment of your existence is spent doing one thing to the exclusion of a literal infinity of other things, no matter what you choose. FOMO has also fed us a lie about what the good life is because ideas like FOMO, tell us that success and wellbeing look one way: Instagram, anyone? flawless, expensive, popular, and never complete.

Conversely, your joy is exactly that: yours, uniquely, profoundly, humanly your own. If you didn't define it for yourself, if you don't get to decide, if you have to pay someone else to have it, it isn't your joy. Now joy isn't necessarily happiness or comfort or delight. In fact, some of those things can be obstacles to joy. In searching for a definition of joy that helps me talk about it, I've come to the conclusion that joy is what we all want. What do we all want? Well-being and success. Joy occurs when success and wellbeing exist simultaneously within us, however we define them for ourselves. Success means the attainment of our goals, whatever they are, and well-being is having a positive relationship with our limits and our ability, whatever they are.

So let's start with success. The definition of success, as it applies to every human being on the planet, is pretty simple: the achievement of goals. The more goals we achieve, the more successful we are. Since it's half of joy, we need goals in our life, always, if we want a shot at joy. So the real question is how do you create good goals?

If you live in a modern technological post-industrial society (Wow. That was a mouthful), as we do, your goals will probably be mostly professional. Earn this much money, achieve this title, launch a successful startup. Someone who lives in a small village in the Himalayas might have goals like: stay warm, get to my neighbor's house before dark, so I don't fall off a cliff or find all my sheep. All these goals have something in common: they're rooted in things outside ourselves. And that's okay because most of life is about meeting challenges that arise from outside us. But if we're seeking joy, we need to pay attention to where external goals come from, because too often, external goals are set for us by entities that don't care about our joy or need to work directly against our joy to profit, by telling us things like: “You don't have enough. You're not doing enough. You are not enough.” If you stop believing all three of these at once, you would never buy something you saw on Instagram, you'd never do a minute of unpaid overtime, you'd never doubt your worthiness to be loved, and a lot of people would make a lot less money on you. 

So where do good goals come from? Behavioral psychologists have long established the best goals, the ones most likely to be achieved positively, are specific, measurable, and time-sensitive, it doesn't matter how large or small the goal is.

What does a large goal even mean? Is making a billion dollars a large goal? Is keeping a relationship for life? Which one is larger? Setting goals compatible with joy is about choosing them honestly, actively, and with self-awareness–these elements are crucial. If we're not honest about what we want, when we set a goal, we'll fail guaranteed, and worse yet it won't be the productive failure everyone's obsessed with these days. It'll be the failure that leads to quitting and despair. 

When our goals are disconnected from joy, they won't survive setbacks. They won't survive the inevitable hardships and challenges that come with being alive. They won't last beyond our mood swings, social trends or cravings. 

Framing our goals this way can lead us to some very tough, sometimes uncomfortable decisions. Remember joy is missing out on some things to have others. They're not easy choices. Joy is not easy. Own your choices. Celebrate them. Be honest with yourself at all times, even if you can't always be honest with the outside world.

When I talk about the other half of joy, I like to use the term wellbeing instead of wellness. Wellness to me sounds more like a descriptor like wealth or beauty. You have it, or you don't, it's outside of you. If you don't have it, you probably want it and go chase it. In seeking joy, I want to challenge you to think of wellbeing as your relationship to who you are instead of a pursuit of things you may or may not have.

As you seek joy through wellbeing, you're working on the most important relationship you have. Your relationship with yourself, and no special accessories, tools, or flavored waters of any kind are required. I want to propose to you today that wellbeing is rooted, more than anything else you do in your life, in the quality and intimacy of your relationships.

There's a lot of research out there that shows powerful correlations between your relationships and your quality of life. But the one I go back to time and time again, is in my opinion, one of the most important studies of human happiness: the Harvard grant study. The Harvard grant study started in 1938 with 268 male undergrads, and it's still going on. There's still a few of those old guys out there. It's the longest running longitudinal study of human beings ever. They took baseline measurements of everything they possibly could: personality type, IQ, drinking habits, birth weight, family tree, hanging, scrotum length. I'm not kidding.

The purpose of this study was to evaluate these men at regular intervals over 75 years (75 years!), and see how they turned out. Were they happy?, Were they successful?, et cetera. The head of the study was a psychiatrist named George Vaillant. He published a book in 2012, Triumphs of Experience, which is an amazing read, about the most recent evaluation at the time, and the analysis of all that data up to that point–remember, these were the same guys, many of them in their nineties. 

There was one variable in all this data that continued to show an irrefutable correlation year after year, measure, after measure. It was so compelling that Vaillant was laughed at when he said it was the linchpin of every measure of success for these guys. He went back and looked at the data again and saw that this variable was even more statistically relevant than he had originally thought. It was intimacy, warmth of relationships and his words. 

What kinds of life outcomes did intimacy predict?--lifetime income, even more predictive than intelligence, reduced likelihood of dementia and old age, reduced likelihood of anxiety, greater reported life satisfaction. Every one of these was predicted more directly by warmth of relationships than any other variable, scrotums included. That's why I say wellbeing is about the quality of your relationships. It's something we can all measure ourselves by, regardless of our physical or mental abilities or bodily health.

If you've got those warm relationships, you'll be happier and probably more successful too. I realize that this is a radical argument to make that the bottom line of your wellbeing is quality relationships, But I mean, it. 

Of course, things like diet, exercise, life balance, having a home, education and so forth, are parts of wellbeing, but really it's the quality of your relationships that's even more fundamental. Why? Now, aside from the intrinsic benefit to your physical and mental wellbeing from having warm relationships, they facilitate the other parts. This is what the grant studies showed. The diet, the exercise, the financial security–when we have deep, meaningful, warm relationships, we have people looking out for us and helping us get the things we need.

We know it's easier to stick to a fitness program, if we have a friend keeping us accountable. We know it's easier to find a good job or get into a good school with friends that can refer, recommend, and advocate for us. Likewise, we're motivated to do the same, to support and care for the people on the other end of those bonds, which empowers, motivates and energizes us. One flows into the other.

This has got to be a part of our search for joy. This is what the JOMOcast is all about. Signposts on the ongoing journey of digital wellbeing. We'll all live with tech for the rest of our lives, but we get to decide how. Hopefully that means missing out on the stuff that's life-taking and filling our days with the stuff that's life-giving.

I hope you'll go on that journey with me. 

You can look forward to interviews with people like Salimah Ebrahim, founder of Artery. 

Salimah: 

Writing about culture isn't just writing about the musician or the artist. Culture is about the room we're in, how people enter, where they sit, how they greet their friends, how they joke with their neighbor.

And often I think through both of our careers, you know, we realized that seeing the small stuff up close, Is the only way to understand the really big stuff. 

Christina:

Effin’ Bird's creator, Aaron Reynolds. 

Aaron:

I stopped bringing my headphones with me places, because I realized I don't spend enough time thinking, you know, I don't spend enough time just with myself and not some other external stimulus.

Christina:

And the Light Phone founder, Joe Hollier. 

Joe:

I'd go out skateboarding. I would never bring my phone cause I didn't want to break it. Um, and they were like the greatest days away, and I think, I thought it had so much to do with skateboarding. And as I thought about it, I was like, actually being away from the phone is probably a big chunk of why it was so refreshing. 

Christina:

Thank you for listening. You can learn more about our guests in the show notes and by visiting JOMOcast.com.